fine whine

I am typing this by candlelight*, since an explosion this morning blew up two transformers at the local substation and knocked the third out of commission. Mine is but one of many thousand houses affected by this blackout, and like the others on my street, is all-electric so I am without heat or a way to cook the food that is quickly spoiling, other than to grill it.

I don't know if Pizza Rolls can be grilled, but I may end up trying that if the power isn't soon restored. AEP claims that the power will be restored by 5a.m. Tuesday, but that was before the torrential downpour began and darkness fell on the thirty or forty-odd trucks worth of repair and emergency workers scrambling to connect a temporary portable transformer and do whatever else needs to be done to get all of us back on line.

I'm 'online' at the moment courtesy of Jessica's aging, but still functional, laptop. Its battery indicators are notoriously wrong, so I have no good way of knowing how much time remains for me to finish complaining.

What bugs me so much isn't that the power goes out so often for so long, but that they have no better system in place to fix things or offer any sort of redundancy. Instead of being a distributed grid or net like, for example, the Internet, the power lines here seem to form more of a tree, with substations for branches, four-house transformers for twigs and individual houses for the leaves.

Last year we learned what happens when one of the smaller transformers gets knocked out, especially on a day when a whole bunch of them go offline. People freeze. If not for kind-hearted friends and their heated house, we'd've gotten frostbite for Christmas and frozen quite readily last year. I doubt the outage will last as long this year, but it seems that the power companies are constantly encountering 'once-in-a-' whatever sort of situations.

Either they're just bad at contingency planning or I'm too picky about being powerless.

It's annoying that I really have few alternatives. We have a decent number of candles ready, and a grill for cooking, and even a flashlight or two, but I'd rather not just get by in this situation. I want my standard of living back.

Do I need a generator? If the battery holds out I think I'll add some to my wishlist for any of you last-minute holiday shoppers.

* Well, I suppose the laptop backlight is giving me some light for typing, but "typing by backlight" just doesn't have the same ring as "candlelight" nor does it convey the ass-backwardness of the situation or my frustration nearly as clearly.